AgenticEvolve: Evolutionary Program Search with Persistent Language Model Agents that Design and Run Experiments

Ze-Yu Peng, Qing-Yu Lan, Zhan-He Wang, Jun Zhang, Yun-Song Piao

Evolutionary program search with large language models keeps the structure of an evolutionary algorithm and uses the model as its variation operator. Typically, the model generates each candidate program in a single request from parent programs and their scores. We present AgenticEvolve, an evolutionary program search framework in which each island is run by a persistent large language model agent. Between evaluations, the agent designs and runs experiments on the candidate program. To measure the contribution of experimentation, we compare AgenticEvolve with No-analysis, an otherwise identical configuration with experiments disabled. On two heuristic design tasks with three large language models, AgenticEvolve produces better programs than No-analysis and OpenEvolve on both hidden and unseen instances. It reaches the baselines' final quality with far fewer evaluations and comparable cost. On twelve equation discovery problems, it recovers the ground-truth structure of more equations than No-analysis and existing language-model and genetic programming baselines.